3A/N: To any The List readers out there, I have not forgotten about it and will update very soon. This just came to me so I'm publishing it first. One shot.
Love Songs from Layla
My father was the best guitarist that never lived. Or so they say, the few that knew him well. He died on April 1st, 1989, three months before I was born. He acquired cancer at a very early age, and when he left the world, no one was taken by surprise. Yet many mourned for the beautiful music he could never play again. He never got to marry my mother; I never received his name. But he gave me another.
He named me Layla after the album, one of the greatest in history, by Derek and the Dominoes where Clapton poured out his love for George Harrison's wife. When Clapton finally got his girl, he left her summarily. And so I was born with a history before me, provided by an unknown father, of love songs and broken realities.
Formed as a defense mechanism to the nightmares of reality (and I've had quite a reality) I live in half-sleep with streams of music in my head and a clatter of words in my heart, a strange accident of heredity. Sometimes I fear that I may be a bit…mad. I fear that the world may not be what I see and that I may have somehow fallen out of orbit.
What is it that I see?
Monsters and butterflies. Honey dew and peanut butter. Saints and sins. Sodom and Gomorrah. I see life.
And life is beautiful.
And life is beautiful.
Diane also lives in a haze, although I know she doesn't like it there. I see her from the periphery of my vision. I never speak to her, hiding as I am beneath the cloak of my friends from empty, hungry souls as she. Diane moves into the hallway, and no one knows she is there. Diane never laughs, she stands. She stands beside a group and smiles at a potential friend. I see her intermittantly between my dreams. Sometimes the power of my stare turns her attention to me. She eats alone. She tells the school she is alone in every step she takes, every quiet word she never breathes. Diane is beautiful, and she terrifies me. As long as she is there, I know I am not her, and it fills me with wonder that she should be. That she should not have ceased to exist by now. Diane is fading, and no one is there to hold her back.
Pygmalion lives in the trap of painful perfection. He laughs with everyone, but he stands alone. He pats backs, holds hands. He watches TV shows his friends tell him to see. He never tells anyone what he watches on his own. He sings so that no one can discern the words. He mimics others and never lets his heart break free. He erases his self to create his own Galatea in its stead. Galatea excels in everything; Galatea never misses a step. Pygmalion never steps at all.
Jamie cries into his headphones. He closes his eyes when the sun hits them, watching orange orbs of warmth through the lids. In the back of his brother's truck, he sits above the highway as it fades into ancient times, his back facing forward.
Sandy looks for clouds at two in the morning. It's the only time she can. Sandy works in the lowest floor of an unknown building in an unknown city. Her cubicle gets no air. Her cushioned chairs are all hand-me-downs, torn to show sponged interiors, puced colored with stains. Her computer was top of the line in 1995. She thinks it's a shame it hasn't kicked the bucket yet. It thinks it's a shame she hasn't left.
Tom sleeps with men when he can. He never sleeps at home, not since the day he ran away, leaving a five month old brother behind to grow and never know him. Tom never thinks of his brother. He can't. He busies himself instead. Parties, drinks, and cigarrettes help him forget that a father and a mother still await him fifty miles away in a quiet, angry place he still somehow calls his home. Tom is my friend, a good one. A close one.
Layla sees the world through her transparents veils. She finds it beautiful in its innocent imperfection – like a baby, unpretentious and unforgettable. She sees its tenderness, its bitter tragedies. She sees it all and yet she has stopped speaking out. Layla sheds no more tears. She hides from it…now, then, and always.
Layla sees the world but she never seizes it.
I am Layla,
Of love songs and broken realities.